SameDiff is a free online tool that lets you compare 2 documents and judge how similar they are, using an algorithm. It gives a quick overview, and then refers you to deeper natural language processing tools.
How to Use Twilio to send SMS messages to your users
Smart Chicago published a Civic Innovation Toolkit on how to use Twilio to be able to send phone messages to your target users or clients. It gives an overview of what kind of resources you can use, and what kind of projects & use cases you can use it for. Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows web … Read More
LIME — Language Independent Markup Editor — for structuring your doc into machine-readable code
LIME, or the Language Independent Markup Editor, is a project from the University of Bologna to help you mark up text so it is machine-readable LIME is an extremely customizable web based editor that guides the user through the markup of non structured documents into well formed (optionally valid) structured XML document compliant to the language plugin chosen by the … Read More
How to model legal cases using CMMN
Here are some useful presentations on how to use Case Management Modeling Notations to model legal cases and procedures. Camunda BPM 7.2: CMMN Case Management (English) from camunda services GmbH Discovery and Analysis for Case Management from Denis Gagne
Yaoqiang BPMN Editor: an open source tool to visualize & model processes
Yaoqiang is a tool that you can use to lay out & encode a legal or a business process. SourceForge presents the Yaoqiang BPMN Editor project. Yaoqiang BPMN Editor is an open source BPMN 2.0 Modeler. Yaoqiang BPMN Editor is a graphical editor for business process diagrams , compliant with OMG specifications (BPMN 2.0) Source: Yaoqiang BPMN Editor – an … Read More
How Case Management Modeling can be useful to legal systems
An excellent presentation overviewing the usefulness of case modeling & process mapping from Denis Gagne:
Case Management: A Review of Modeling Approaches
Henk de Man has a wonderful 2009 article from BPTrends that overview different systems to encode up systems and processes. It examines the different languages and notations to encode up things like legal processes. Here is the link: Case Management Review
Business Process Simulator – free tool to diagram & simulate models
The Business Process Simulator is a free, web-based tool to create diagrams of business processes and run simulations of them. Introduction Business Process Simulator is a web application of simulation software class for the analysis of business processes. Purpose of the Service Search for bottlenecks in the business process where lack of resources or of performers; Evaluation of the resource … Read More
How can we manage legal processes systematically?
Here is one overview of different topics within Business Process Management, from Garry Gomersall: These tools can help law organizations start to model out their cases, workflows, and other processes that happen commonly. By mapping processes, you can find inefficiencies and also build tools on top of the processes.
Modelio, open source tool to model processes
Modelio Open Source Community offers a free tool to make models of processes, in a coded-up format. Modelio is an open source modeling environment (UML2, BPMN2, …). Based on a 20-year track record of high end commercial products, Modelio delivers a broad-focused range of standards-based functionalities for software developers, analysts, designers, business architects and system architects
SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks) visual programming
SNAP! (Build Your Own Blocks) is a visual programming language/tool from UC Berkeley. It may have grown out of children-focused CS instruction, but it is useful for any beginner to programming who is more visually inclined. It is used to teach non-CS majors at UC Berkeley, in the course “Beauty & Joy of Computing.” More about Snap programming: Snap! (formerly … Read More
Coding for Lawyers online book
Coding for Lawyers is an online book by V. David Zvenyach (a lawyer with an engineering background) that introduces the essentials of computer programming to lawyers. It’s a very useful entry-level text, that doesn’t presume much familiarity with coding. It takes a lawyer-centered approach that begins to orient the novice to the way that programmers think — how they approach … Read More
QnA Markup to create interactive conversational resources
QnA Markup is an excellent and playful coding editor from lawyer/coder David Colarusso. Its code is available on GitHub for others to use & build from. It allows you to program out a series of questions and paths for the user to answer & follow. It allows for very fun, lively, conversational experiences. There is real promise here as a … Read More
Codiqa: a mobile app development tool
Codiqa : a Mobile App Development Tool allows anyone, regardless of coding ability, to create a mobile app that can be published for Android or iOS. Codiqa allows you to build your app visually — dragging and dropping elements on to the screen — and it generates the code to create an HTML5 app. As you are building and testing, … Read More
RapidPro: an open source interactive texting system
The team at TextIt has made their code base open source, calling it RapidPro, meaning that others can use this code base to develop their own interactive texting systems. The code will let you construct an interactive system that texts & responds to end users via SMS messages on a phone. It’s wonderfully visual as an authoring tool, letting you … Read More
Make Web Apps with AngularJS
An online coding course from Code School: Shaping up with AngularJS. Here is a Code School online course to learn AngularJS. It’s a JavaScript framework from Google. Some more details from Angular’s site: HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when we try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS lets you extend HTML … Read More
Build a Crowdsourced Map with Ushahidi
Ushahidi is a platform to develop a crowdsourced map of information. Here is its Github repository. The Ushahidi Platform is an open source web application for information collection, vizualisation and interactive mapping. It allows people to collect and share their own stories using various mediums such as SMS, Web Forms, Email or Twitter. For more information about the platform and … Read More
Texting Systems: FrontlineSMS
If you are developing a text-based messaging system, an open-source & mainly free tool to use is FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS is a desktop software created to lower barriers to positive social change using mobile technology. By leveraging basic tools already available to most organizations, including those in ‘last-mile’ settings — computers and low-cost modems — FrontlineSMS enables instantaneous two-way communication to … Read More
Legal Design Tool: Automatic Text Service
Set up your own text-messaging service for free. « SMS 411. If your legal design project may involve texting, particularly to ‘non-smart’ or dumb phones, then TextMarks may be a useful development tool to prototype an automatic texting system. You don’t have to be a big company to set up a text-message auto-response system. With TextMarks, you can set up … Read More
Create Interactive Web-based Data Tables: tutorial from Data for Radicals
Data For Radicals has a great tutorial for making searchable, filterable tables of your data. Here is a clip of the illustrated, step-by-step tutorial, go over to the site for a full version. Visual approaches to data are great — they can allow us to grasp complex issues at a glance, just the way this map from Clear Health Costs … Read More
Make an interactive vertical timeline: tutorial from Data for Radicals
I found the wonderful Data for Radicals site, that has a rich set of illustrated tutorials on making interactive visualizations. Since I’ve been collecting timeline-creators, here’s another example — but this time, it’s a Vertical Timeline. A clip of the tutorial is below, go to this link to see the full thing! The Absurdly Illustrated Guide To Your First Dynamic, … Read More
How to create a Gantt Chart in Excel
Use Gant Charts to create a project management system, or a way to see what needs to happen before you get a finished project. You can create cascading dependencies based on time, so that you see how time changes will affect other parts of the process & the final deliverable. Here is a tutorial from SmartSheet. What Is a Gantt … Read More
Make an Interactive Timeline: TimelineSetter
ProPublica has created an interactive timeline-maker TimelineSetter. You can create a spreadsheet with special formatting & layout, and then load it into the code that you’ve installed on your website. TimelineSetter 0.3.2 TimelineSetter creates beautiful timelines. It is a command-line utility that takes a specially-structured CSV file as input and outputs standards-compliant HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It supports any span of time from … Read More
Make an Interactive Timeline
SIMILE Widgets | Timeline is an open-source tool to make timelines. You can add filters to highlight certain events, and scroll through the visual to see exactly the time that you need. Each of the events is also expandable, to see more details with each.
Make interactive stories & games with Twine
Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You can create games or stories — including legal ones — to help create more instructional, scenario-based legal tools. You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready. … Read More
Build a Content Management System
Building a content management system can seem like a daunting task to the novice PHP developer. However, it needn’t be that difficult. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to build a basic, but fully functional, CMS from scratch in just a few hours. Yes, it can be done! Along the way, you’ll learn how to create MySQL databases and … Read More
Make Interactive Visuals with D3
D3 is a way to make interactive visualizations from datasets, that you can display online, embedded in HTML. Make complex data usable, visible, and powerful! How to use D3 in your project? I you know how to use JavaScript, you’re off to a great start. For people who want to look through a bunch of tutorials and exercises, check out … Read More
Make an Interactive Flowchart in Excel
Here is an Interactive Flowcharting Tutorial – FlowBreeze Help. This tutorial will take you through the steps to create a flowchart using the interactive flowcharting mode of FlowBreeze. Because FlowBreeze is an Excel add-in, it will load with Excel but the interactive text-to-flowchart generation remains idle until you start a flowcharting session. It will operate on only one worksheet at … Read More
Make Interactive Visualizations: Graphviz
Graphviz | Graphviz – Graph Visualization Software. Graphviz is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks. It has important applications in networking, bioinformatics, software engineering, database and web design, machine learning, and in visual interfaces for other technical domains. The Graphviz layout programs take descriptions of … Read More
Run Legal Software: Free Law Virtual Machine
From: Free Law Virtual Machine Available for Academics and Developers, sponsored by the Free Law Project. A goal of the Free Law Project is to make development of legal tools as easy as possible. In that vein, we’re excited to share that as of today we’re officially taking the wraps off what we’re calling the Free Law Virtual Machine. For … Read More
Create a Web App: an 8 step tutorial
CSS-Tricks has an 8 step tutorial Creating a Web App from Scratch for those who want to make interactive tools on the web. It is rich & step-by-step, walking you through how to conceive & scope your idea, and then to actually build it each step of the way.
Make an Interactive Map with StoryMap JS
The Knight Lab has StoryMap JS a tool for you to make interactive, visual stories through maps.
Make A Beautiful Timeline
Timeline JS is an online tool from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, that lets users make beautiful timelines in an easy & intuitive way. You have to prepare the times & contents in a spreadsheet, and then the tool lays it out into a gorgeous interactive tool. It’s just four steps to get a great timeline!
Build a website: Going from Photoshop Files to HTML
Designmodo has a tutorial Create a Website using UI Packs (PSD to HTML) that will take you from a photoshop file of the website that you want to create, to the actual HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can implement the site. This is a good tutorial for bridging from high-resolution designs of a website to the actual development of the … Read More
Building a website: Twitter Bootstrap Grid System tutorial
This Twitter Bootstrap Grid System tutorial will walk you through some web development, using “Twitter Bootstrap” — which gives you pre-programmed designs & elements to reconfigure into the website you want. This tutorial in particular is meant for developing a site on a grid system — which is particularly useful if you are making a site with multiple columns. You … Read More